Collectivizing the Platform: Re-Imagining Hotel Living as an Affordable Housing Strategy in San Francisco

Abstract

This thesis proposes to re-evaluate the role of the Single Room Occupancy Hotel (SRO) typology to aid affordable housing production in San Francisco within the context of Californian techno-dominance. In our platform economy, prop-tech platforms enable the accelerated financialization of rental housing leading to gentrification, unaffordability, and eviction while the conditions of SRO hotels, a historically affordable type of housing, declines. The approach explores theoretical Platform Cooperativist ideas as a method of collectivizing the production of housing, drawing from cooperative construction methods on various sites. By collectivizing the platform and factors of housing production: labour, land, and capital, digital platforms are re-tooled to improve maintenance efforts, mitigate vacancy, and densify existing SRO hotel sites. Through a theoretical un-making of platform technologies and a vernacular study of hotel typologies, drawing, mapping, and urban analysis become tools to explore hotel living as a viable alternative for today’s affordability crisis. The proposal intends to increase the availability of affordable units by offering more equitable, socially responsible, living options for the most vulnerable tenants in the city.